Valve to reveal virtual reality prototype

Valve has released the schedule for its upcoming Steam Developer Days event, and in doing so revealed it will be showcasing its own "affordable Virtual Reality (VR) hardware"

The device will be on show at the "What VR Could, Should, and Almost Certainly Will Be within Two Years" session, where Valve will discuss what the hardware is like, and what kinds of experiences it makes possible. It has also revealed that after the talk some attendees will be randomly selected to try out the prototype.

As well as this hardware centric VR session there will also be one called simply "Virtual Reality and Steam", which will discuss "what Valve is working on in Steam to support and promote Virtual Reality (VR) games."

"This includes a discussion of the Steam Overlay in VR, Steam store changes for VR, and our VR plan for Steamworks."

The Oculus Rift team will also be there, presenting a talk on porting games to VR.

Valve has long shown its support for VR technology with it being among the first developers to make some of its games (Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2) compatible with Oculus Rift.

The new addition to its hardware prototype roster further marks Valve's ambitions to create the next big gaming platform, with its Steam Machines console and Steam Controller having already staked a claim for the living room.

It'll be interesting to see just what the company reveals come 15-16 January 2014.

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4 Comments

Interesting. I hope we'll see a real stereoscopic technology, for the consumer, using a GPU per eye (instead of 3Dvision / tridef approach). I've read recently on BT about this possibility with nvidia drivers (through SLI management), but I do not know if it's already available.

3D needs something like the QUAD BUFFERING (one dual buffer per eye), only available on professionnal GPU (Firepro / Quadro)